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Overview
The Peruvian highlanders have confronted the pressures of modern culture with remarkable vitality. They use improved boats and gear and sell fish to new markets but have fiercely opposed efforts to strip them of their indigenous traditions. They have retained their customary practice of limiting the amount of fishing and have continued to pass cultural knowledge from one generation to the next--practices that have prevented the ecological crises that have followed commercialization of small-scale fisheries around the world. This book--at once a memoir and an ethnography--is a personal and compelling account of a research experience as well as an elegantly written treatise on themes of global importance. Above all, Orlove reminds us that human relations with the environment, though constantly changing, can be sustainable.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520935891 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 06/13/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 314 |
| Lexile: | 1300L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
LINES IN THE WATER
Nature and Culture at Lake TiticacaBy BEN ORLOVE
University of California
Copyright © 2002 Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-22959-2
Chapter One
MountainsSoon after I moved into my apartment in Puno in 1979, I put maps of the altiplano on the wall of the larger of the two rooms. They gave it the appearance of an office or a study, thus reassuring me, when I doubted that my research was advancing very well, that I really was a serious anthropologist. Even in less anxious moments I drew some comfort from them, since they linked me to prior generations of field researchers who also had used maps as decorations. I ended up installing a large, disparate collection, justifying each addition by the fact that no single map showed in detail the entire altiplano, as the plateau that contains the Lake Titicaca basin is known. (Most maps of the altiplano are made by national governments, and each-motivated by a mix of nationalist pride and military caution-depicts the other's territory as blank space.) My favorite was a Peruvian map that showed the department of Puno. Though its dull browns and grays lacked aesthetic appeal, it showed in great detail the configuration of the lakeshore and the lands near it. Coming in a close second were the tasteful aquatic maps that showed land in white and gray and reserved color for the lake itself, depicting waters at greater depths in successively darker shades of blue. I included as well a national map of Bolivia that indicated the country's departments not with the red, yellow, and green of the nation's flag, but with the garish substitutes of magenta, mustard, and lime.
One day, when I was taking a break from typing up notes, I got up from the piece of furniture that served as my desk and dining table and strolled over to the map-covered wall. I became interested in the largest peninsula in the lake, about seven hundred square kilometers in area. It is shaped something like an hourglass, with an unusually bulbous lower half. The bottom of the hourglass is attached to the shores of the lake; the neck is an isthmus, less than three kilometers wide; and the top projects far into the lake. The bottom half of the peninsula, I noticed, consists essentially of one tall mountain, Ccapia, whose summit, at 4,809 meters, is almost exactly a thousand meters above the level of the lake, 3,808 meters. After checking over all the maps, I realized that no place could provide a better view: other mountains are lower, or farther from shore, or behind other peaks that would block the lake. I resolved to climb to its summit. From its top I would be able to see the two main sections of the lake, the Lago Grande and the smaller Lago Pequeño, separated by the narrow Straits of Tiquina.
I would have preferred a mountain that was easier to get to. Ccapia is almost midway between Puno and the Bolivian capital of La Paz, about 120 kilometers from each. This distance was not great by the standards of industrial countries, but it meant a long trip on the dirt roads of the altiplano. I noticed that Ccapia lay near some roads, the ones that connected the larger villages on the peninsula. Wondering whether I might be able to climb this mountain, I went to the tall basket in which I kept other maps rolled up. I soon found a more detailed map of the lower portion of the peninsula. With any pretense of completing my field notes cast aside, I cleared off my table and examined the map. Drawn on a scale of 1:100,000, it indicated footpaths as thin, unbroken black lines. These lines crossed the mountain and went right to the top. From my experience in other parts of Peru, I had learned that these maps were usually accurate. If they contained any mistakes, it was to omit paths, rather than to put in nonexistent ones.
I was glad to consult this map, not only to obtain the information that it contained, but also to recollect the effort that I had made to obtain it. I had seen the entire series to which it belonged in the main university library at Berkeley, and I knew that I wanted copies of the altiplano portion to use in Peru. They contained valuable information on lakeshore villages, and, perhaps even more important, I knew their familiarity would comfort me in this alien land. They bore a strong resemblance to the topographic maps on similar scales that had guided me while I was backpacking in California. Such maps of the United States could easily be purchased in camping supply stores, but it took some doing to obtain similar ones in Peru. There was only one place in the entire country where they were sold: the Peruvian Military Geographical Institute, in a former mansion in an out-of-the-way neighborhood of Lima not well served by bus lines. The room where maps were sold was just to the right of the main entry hall, in what must have been one of the formal salas, or living rooms, of the mansion. Individuals who wanted to buy maps-mostly government officials who had vehicles and drivers to take them to this institute -were required to present some sort of identification. Their names, addresses, and identity-document numbers were entered in a registry of map-buyers. Because every copy of every map had a number stamped on it, the government could presumably track down all the maps in case a war broke out. (The blank obverse side of the maps bore a list of the Obligaciones del Comprador, the duties of the purchaser, which included turning the map in to national authorities at the first signs of an outbreak of civil disturbance.) In the case of certain regions frequented by tourists, such as the Inca trail to Machu Picchu or the more popular peaks of the Cordillera Blanca, the institute staff might soften the regulations and accept a hotel in Lima as an address, rather than insisting on a more permanent residence or office.
Had the changes of bus and the long walk to the institute not delayed my arrival until late in the afternoon, when many of the staff had already left, I probably never would have been able to obtain the five sheets of this series, which included the portions of the border near Lake Titicaca. I presented my passport and copies of my official convenio, or agreement with the Peruvian government agency IMARPE. These documents did not fully satisfy the clerk; he was unable to decide whether he should sell me the maps I had requested. Would his superiors be angry with him if they found that he had made so weighty a decision in their absence? Was I a well-connected figure who could make trouble for him if he refused me?
After a few minutes of trying to postpone this difficult decision, he brightened. "¿No necesita recibo, verdad?" (You don't need a receipt, do you?), he asked. I assured him that I did not. He checked to see that the armed guard at the door was not looking in on us, then went back into the storeroom. He looked nervous as he laid out the sensitive border sheets on the counter. In too much of a rush to check my documents for the correct spelling of my sponsors, he scribbled a misspelled "IMARFE" in the space for "identification of purchaser" printed on the maps, and a second acronym, one that I have been unable to decode, "DINTE," for the "signature of permission-granting authority." He took my money, rolled the set of maps into a cylinder, thrust it into my hands, and hurried me out the door. I was delighted to have the maps in my possession and set off on the long walk to the avenue where I would catch a bus back to my hotel.
The encounter became clearer to me after I'd thought it over. Few of these maps had been sold. The clerk must have known that the registry of purchasers was checked only infrequently, so that even if the gap in these border sheets were noticed, he would be only one of several individuals on whom blame might be placed. Moreover, the acronyms he had put on my map consisted of capital letters written in block script rather than cursive. It would therefore be difficult to trace him if anyone apprehended me with the maps and doubted the legitimacy of the channels through which I had obtained them. No definitive evidence against him could be presented. In the meantime, he must have pocketed the cash that I had given him. Had he given any of it to the apparently inattentive guard, I wondered? I somehow thought that he had not, but I could not be sure.
And here in Puno, seeking to climb a mountain, my efforts at obtaining these maps paid off. This sheet, which I had previously used only to locate fishing villages and reedbeds, showed the routes to the summit of Ccapia. I asked Hugo and René, the younger biologists at IMARPE whom I saw regularly, if they'd like to join me. I had accompanied them and Eufracio, the director, on two or three trips to the peninsula, first to the remote village of Vilurcuni to select fishermen for our catch survey, and later to complete other surveys. And the IMARPE staff was always ready for an excuse to visit the border town of Yunguyo, on the peninsula's isthmus. With a smaller government presence than Desaguadero, it was a good place to pick up contraband, especially small electronic items that had been smuggled all the way across Bolivia from Brazil, and the much prized café de los yungas, the dark, strong-flavored coffee from the lowland Bolivian valleys between the Andes and the Amazon. But mountain climbing seemed a bit strenuous to them. Urban dwellers at heart, they liked to take their vacations in cities. Their idea of a pleasant outing in the altiplano was a visit to a hot spring or an excursion to a town with some local food specialty such as roast lamb. I kept talking up the possible climb, and it became a bit of a joke. The other biologists would tease Hugo, the shortest and fattest among them, suggesting that a run up the mountain would be a good way for him to burn off his excess kilos. He would retort that he was gordito pero agilito, plump but quick on his feet-a truth they had to recognize, since he was one of the best players on the IMARPE soccer team. He achieved a double balance with this response, since he knew that I never accepted the invitations of the IMARPE biologists and technicians to join in one of their games. Aside from Amanda, the one woman biologist, they were all at least competent at the sport, having played it since their boyhoods, and some of them were quite good. By contrast, I was a very poor player and did not want them to see how awkward I was on the field. This unwillingness of mine to play soccer balanced with their reluctance to climb a mountain; we were even. They were as glad as I was to have the pair of unmet invitations as a reliable and safe source of banter.
If not with my IMARPE friends, then with whom could I climb Ccapia? Though Cirilo was a sturdy walker, he was in his sixties and had limited vision. The climb might be too strenuous for him. Tito was a possibility. I had gone on outings to pre-Inca ruins and colonial churches with him. He shared my curiosity about the altiplano and my fondness for hikes, in part, I think, because he was a bit of an outsider in town himself. He was the son of the owner of one of the largest hardware stores in Puno, the grandson of Italian immigrants-and hence, by local standards, someone who was clearly a newcomer. His old Volkswagen could take us to the foot of Ccapia as reliably as the IMARPE Toyota Land Cruiser could. We discussed the trip, but it never materialized. Ccapia was much higher than the hills we had scrambled up to see ancient burial towers, and even Atojja, the one sizable mountain that we had climbed, was not as high. It was a good bit farther from Puno as well, and it would have entailed an earlier departure than Tito was accustomed to.
I needed some other plan. I knew that the base of the mountain was easy to get to, and that I would pass by it on one of my trips between Puno and La Paz. Occasionally, I traveled between these two cities by the routes that did not pass the mountain. I sometimes spent two or three days on the narrow winding roads on the northeast shore of the lake, with long delays in the squares of small towns while I waited for a truck to take me on the next leg of my trip. On two occasions, I went directly across the lake by steamer. This form of travel was the most enjoyable: it was comfortable, it had the best views-the sunrise over the snow-covered peaks of the Cordillera Real took on an added beauty when reflected in the waters of the lake-and the steamer itself was a wonderful old ship, the glamour it must have had in the 1930s still evident in its old brass fittings and worn velvet curtains. But these alternatives were slow, so I usually took the main road on the southwest side of the lake, and this is the road that passed by Ccapia. It was the widest of the roads around the lake, although, like all the others, it was not paved. With two full lanes, cars and trucks did not need to slow down very much to pass each other. Running through flatter terrain, it was less likely to get washed out and was more quickly repaired when it did. On this road, buses could cover the 240 kilometers between Puno and La Paz in ten hours, sometimes in eight.
This road went south from Puno through a series of small towns: Chucuito, Acora, Ilave, Juli, Pomata. These had been former cabaceras, or chiefly villages, of the Lupaqa nation, both when it was an independent kingdom and after it was conquered by the Incas and became a province of their empire. The towns had been parishes under Spanish rule, and they became districts soon after independence. When the road reached Pomata, at the base of Ccapia, it divided in two. The principal branch continued to the southwest along the base of the hourglass peninsula. It passed below Ccapia and reached first Zepita (the sixth of the Lupaqa settlements) and then Desaguadero, a town named for the river on whose banks it had been built. This river marks the border between Peru and Bolivia, and Desaguadero is the easiest place to cross between these two countries: the Peruvian border station is only a few blocks from the river, and the Bolivian station is right next to the modern cement bridge. The Bolivian portion of the trip to La Paz passed quickly on the flat road that climbed slowly up the altiplano away from the lake until it reached the lip of the canyon in which the city stands.
The other fork of the road from Pomata offered a slower, more scenic route to La Paz. Following the edge of the lower half of the hourglass, it hugged the shore, circling around Ccapia to Yunguyo, the seventh and last of the Lupaqa towns, and to the border, two kilometers farther on. Passengers were not permitted to ride between the several hundred meters that separated the border stations, but instead had to walk, a process that often created a certain amount of confusion and delay. Seven kilometers past the border lay the first Bolivian town, Copacabana, the site of major shrines since pre-Inca times and now the seat of a cathedral and the home of the Virgin of Copacabana, Bolivia's patron saint.
Continues...
Excerpted from LINES IN THE WATER by BEN ORLOVE Copyright © 2002 by Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsPreface: Lakes
1. Not Forgetting
2. Mountains
3. Names
4. Work
5. Fish
6. Reeds
7. Paths
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index